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Microsoft's Lobbying Priorities: Limiting Open Source
MonkeyDev writes "In the story on cio.com, 'Mr. Gates Goes to Washington', the author says...'Microsoft cared little for politics until the Department of Justice called it a monopoly. Now the company approaches lobbying the way it approaches everything- aggressively-and consequently it dominates the technology policy agenda.' The article outlines Microsoft's power, provides several examples of legislative decisions heavily influenced by the company, and talks about where they are aiming their newly found political clout. 'Microsoft's policy agenda includes issues that many CIOs agree with, notably more government funding for research and development, stronger copyright protection, and free trade in offshore products and services. However, two of Microsoft's policy priorities, limiting the adoption of open-source software and inoculating technology companies from spam liability, stand out as areas wherein what's good for Microsoft may not be good for all CIOs.' Further, 'Microsoft has lobbied particularly hard against open source, helping kill state bills that advocate for open source in Oregon and Texas. Microsoft argues that open source freezes innovation, and Krumholtz says that commercial software alone spurs economic growth and creates jobs.'"
Actually, if I was Microsoft, I would try and manipulate free software in a way beneficial to me and make as much money as possible off of it, instead of trying to kill a potentially huge source of revenue.
That's exactly what IBM does.
Yes, that's capitalism. As we all know, monopoly is one of the possible natural evolutions of capitalism. But as we all know, a monopoly is a damage for the capitalist system itself. That's why serious, free and capitalism-supporting countries -- as US is -- have antitrust policies.
Microsoft is a monopoly now. Antitrust should do something about.
The quid pro quo with AT&T was universal service and regulated rates. AT&T was not allowed to compete in the computer field until after the breakup of the company. In hindsight their computer marketing was so poor, there really was no worry about it monopolizing the computer field at it did telecommunications.
AT&T did exercise strong monopoly powers. I remember when it was illegal to hook up anything to the phone system. You had to lease your phone from AT&T. The phone device and all the wiring belonged to AT&T. To tamper with the phone or the wiring was illegal. This of course sounds awfully similar to some of the DRM legislation being pushed in Congress to forbid tampering with DVDs and other multimedia.
AT&T had the telecommunications strangelhold as a government regulated monopoly with at least a publically stated quid pro quo. It seems that Microsoft wants the benefits of monopoly power without any of that pesky government interference.
I hope legislators see through a lot of Microsoft's FUD and understand that a truly competitive playing field which includes FOSS software is the best environment for software innovation.
I would oppose any deal with Microsoft that limits competition. I do not think such a deal would serve the public interest.
Government agencies spend millions of dollars on software. The purchasing policies of those agencies are ultimately set by the legislatures.
I can't speak to these particular bills, but most "pro-open source" bills boil down to requiring that government agencies consider open source solutions when doing purchasing.
jf
republic:
n.
1.
1. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
2. A nation that has such a political order.
2.
1. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
2. A nation that has such a political order.
3. often Republic A specific republican government of a nation: the Fourth Republic of France.
4. An autonomous or partially autonomous political and territorial unit belonging to a sovereign federation.
5. A group of people working as equals in the same sphere or field: the republic of letters.
democracy:
n.
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
according to our friend the dictionary, a republic has a head (monarch or president) and a representative body (house, senate), while a democracy has every citizen voting on everything directly or through elected officials (house, senate).
so far, republic wins.
You also misunderstand the "anti-property rights corner"'s position. Their point is that creative works aren't property, but have been given certain property-like qualities for a limited time.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
Not a huge fan of Red Hat, but you're not quite correct, since Red Hat does do quite a bit of driver development that goes right back into the kernel. So you are reaping some benefit, and it is entirely due to it being Free Software.
Hey, Troll-boy, are you saying that mmarket share is based on ease of use, or that open source software keeps you from having a good desktop, or what?
The Apple Macintosh is generally considered the easiest desktop computer to use... even Bill Gates has said as much. But it's got about the same market share as Linux, and it's built on an open-source OS.
So whatever your alleged point is, that should be enough to render it clearly nonsense.
Microsoft's market share is the result of cross-promotion and the application barrier to entry.
And open source software is just as capable of being the base of an excellent product.
According to a post just a handful above yours, IBM has a policy which forbids influencing political processes. Yes Virginia, it is possible the businesses practices of a convicted abusive monopoly are reprehensible, something Microsoft uber-fanboys would do well to consider.
A few points to consider:
- The original software is free
- Writing the improvements is cheaper than writing the whole program, and possibly cheaper than paying the original developer for specific improvements (which will likely end up in the software everyone else buys anyway)
- Once you have the improved/customized software, at reduced cost over the closed source variant, it costs you nothing to release the improvements. This in turn makes it possible for others to build on your work, possibly with improvements you end up using - at no cost to you! (with closed source, you might have to pay for an upgrade, or worse, pay for features you never wanted in an upgrade)
Yes, open source can be / is a marketing tool.
It can also be a service guarantee - particularly in niche market software - even if the original author goes broke, or the product is no longer viable to support, if the company supports open source there is a fair chance they will release all their work so their product can continue on.
Take some of the early 3d games for example - even though the software was originally closed source, once the software stopped being profitable, the company released the source, and those who wished to continue improving it have done so.
The same can apply to any software, and can be particularly important for business.
There is one notable exception to this pattern [of donating equally to both parties], however: the 2000 presidential election. During the campaign Microsoft donated close to $60,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and over $390,000 to the Republican National Committee. In contrast, Microsoft gave $28,750 to Democratic challenger Al Gore and $65,000 to the Democratic National Committee.
While there were many causes for the outcome of the 2000 election, Microsoft shares the responsibility for the election of George W Bush, and consequently for all the shit he has done while in office. There couldn't be a more perfect illustration of why businesses, whose only priority is their shareholders, should not get involved in political lobbying.
Go ahead, mod me down, but I believe strongly that every soldier and every innocent civilian killed in Iraq has Microsoft -- among many others, of course -- to thank.
some of microsoft's most prominent products are either ripoffs (xerox parc gui+mouse)
//sidethought - wonder what would happen if xerox patented THAT idea!>br>
or outright purchase like NCSA's internet browser!
and when they DO come up with a new product, its a failure (BOB is dead!) or irritating (go away clippy!)
go ahead troll me down, my karma is dead anyways!
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
In the first scenario, you still have $X million left over to spend on something else. In the second scenario, you do not. Even if the first scenario creates jobs for people to create the software you're buying, in the second, scenario, you can use that $X million to pay other people to create things anyway, cutting out an unnecessary middleman. Someone already mentioned the broken window fallacy, and you apparently have fallen right into it.
Also:
This is a good thing. Ultimately, from an overall standpoint, we don't want to have to expend workers on maintenance tasks; ideally we want to reduce maintenance expenditures to a minimum (something technology can help with, over time), and have people working on creative tasks instead.It's like complaining if someone invents a robot that can take the place of a garbageman. The guys who were hurling garbage around are now freed up for tasks which benefit society more. Yes, I understand that not every worker can be put into any random job, but there is a lot of flexibility in terms of what people are capable of doing. If technology allows us to get rid of jobs whose sole purpose is to allow the advancing, creative jobs to exist, then we can put more people into those creative jobs.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I don't know how this affects things in the US? Very little i suspect since American Politics seems to be so corrupt and debased these days that Billy would be able to buy his way around any obsticle.
Personally i was sickened when he got his Knighthood. This man has done more to stifle competition and innovation than any other person in history yet we Brits award him by giving him a knighthood. I want to puke!
A Dog isn't just for Xmas. With luck there will be some left over for Boxing day as well.
Fair enough, you couldn't use ANDF for web applets. so, TenDRA could have done everything other than web applets that Java is used for, and everything that I would actually trust .NET for. Neither the JVM nor .NET are inherently safe designs.
.NET both offer runtime safety; ANDF does not offer runtime safety. Java and .NET also happen to offer sandboxing, but as you observe, sandboxing is a pretty special purpose application.
.NET), not with safety or sandboxing.
You are confusing runtime safety and sandboxing. Runtime safety prevents type-correct programming from making type errors. Sandboxing prevents hostile programs from doing damage. The two are two independent properties of runtime systems. In fact, it's easy to have sandboxing without runtime safety.
Java and
And the startup overhead that sandbox imposes is unacceptably high. Java applets run quickly once they have been checked and started, but the number of applications where that 30-second-to-a-minute startup overhead is worth it is a tiny fraction of the ones where it's used.
Hey, what can I say: the Java platform specification and its implementations both suck. But that's a specific problem with Java (and its clone,
Linux gives people a choice. [..] I think you misspelled "Open Systems give people a choice".
I didn't say "Linux is the only system that gives people a choice", I said "Linux gives people a choice".
My open systems of choice are FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Tru64.
I think you are a bit confused on the notion of "open systems" if you call Mac OS X an "open system". The Darwin kernel and command line environment may be considered "open systems", but a lot of Mac OS X components are highly proprietary and conform to no standard, open or otherwise.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Ah. You're mixing up the language and the implementation.
.NET implement safety at the runtime and assembly level, while ANDF does not. At the language level, Java and C# give you runtime safety, while the Tendra C/C++ compilers (which you gave as an alternative) do not.
No, I'm not. The JVM and
If the language you are compiling to ANDF does not enforce safe operations, then you can't compile that language to an intermediate code that enforces safe options unless you restrict yourself to a subset of that language.
It's not that simple. First of all, ANDF fails to define a runtime that allows safe code to interoperate safely. Second, ANDF fails to mark unsafe code explicitly, so I get no guarantees about a piece of ANDF code.
In contrast, all JVM code is safe and the JVM defines an entire safe runtime.
And the CLR gets the best of both worlds: it defines a safe runtime infrastructure, but it also lets you execute unsafe code, but that code is marked explicitly even in the binary.
Sorry, but ANDF just is not even close to being a replacement for the JVM or the CLR, and the JVM isn't a substitute for the CLR either.
You're treating "open systems" and "open source" too much as synonyms.
No, I don't. The vast majority of OS X APIs are neither open systems nor open source.
I would say that the interfaces and protocols in the OS X window system are better documented and more stable than either of the X11 based systems,
X11 is an open, well-specified protocol that has remained stable for nearly 20 years and stood the test of time. As for Gnome and KDE, they are just two of many interoperable toolkits and frameworks that run on top of X11. I think neither is particularly good, but both are clearly open and extensively documented.
The API is based on NeXTstep and minutely documented, and there's an open source implementation of NeXTstep that runs on UNIX.
Oh? Please point to an open specification of those APIs, i.e., a specification that comes with legal guarantees that anybody can implement it without fear of lawsuits from NeXT or Apple.
Furthermore, GNUStep is far from a usable implementation of NeXTStep. Even if it were, the question of whether the NeXTStep APIs are open or not is academic: they just don't have a future, not even on Macintosh.
Java and C# give you runtime safety, while the Tendra C/C++ compilers (which you gave as an alternative) do not
.NET runtimes for, you can implement exactly the same language with exactly the same type-safety guarantees using ANDF. Remember my thought-experiment? Take your Java or .NET code, and use a not-just-in-time precompiler to transcode it to ANDF instead of x86 assembly code. This is inefficient, of course, and you can do better... but it demonstrates there's nothing in ANDF that keeps you from using it with a type-safe language.
You're mixing up all kinds of different issues here. I started out talking about alternatives to GCC, and in that context I suggested tcc as an alternative. Then you argued that ANDF didn't provide type-safety.
Well, damn, you can't use a type-safe runtime for a general purpose C or C++ compiler. Burroughs demonstrated that something like twenty years ago. So the fact that you don't get a type-safe runtime with a non-type-safe language is a red herring. What this boils down to is that ANDF doesn't require a type safe language because it doesn't enforce type safety.
I don't see how this is a limitation on ANDF.
For any language that it's meaningful to talk about using the Java or
Summary: type-safety is an attribute of a language. An intermediate code that requires a type-safe language is more limited than one that doesn't.
The vast majority of OS X APIs are neither open systems nor open source.
Virtually every API in a bare Linux or BSD install, without X, is there in Mac OS X. And every line of THAT is open source, and every one of those interfaces are open systems. And, hey, that's also pretty much everything that I ever use... so even if everything stopped here OS X would remain one of my open systems of choice.
On top of that is an open systems but not open-source graphical environment, OpenGL. OpenGL applications can be as easily ported to OS X as to any other OpenGL environment.
On top of that is a window system based on NeXTstep. This is not an open system, but there is an open source implementation of it, and it's stable and well documented. And it's certainly usable, I was using GNUstep as my default FreeBSD "desktop" before I switched to OS X.
On top of that are a bunch of additional tools, mostly not open systems nor open source. But some, like the X11 server, certainly qualify.
OK, let's contrast this with Linux or FreeBSD.
You have pretty much the same environment up to the window system.
There, the graphical environment is X11 rather than OpenGL. The raw X11 system is almost a complete window system, but it does more than OpenGL in that dimension. On the other hand, it's got other limitations that make me wish whatever they're calling Berlin these days would gel into something usable.
On top of that, you have a choice of toolkits and GUIs. These are not precisely peers with Aqua and Cocoa, but they're close. There's more of the GUI implemented at this level on Mac OS X, but in both cases you don't have a complete GUI without it. Some of these toolkits are open source, some aren't, there have been some UNIX window systems that were as proprietary as Cocoa/Aqua. NeWS, for example, was all Sun's but I sure hope you're not going to try and argue SunOS wasn't an open system as a result.
But, hey, look at that, you can run all your X11 software on Mac OS X using Apple's X11 server or using a third party X11 server. Native is better, of course, but it's better than XNews.
Summary: Mac OS X is at least as much an open system as any other commercial UNIX: it provides as many open interfaces and protocols as Tru64, HPUX, or Solaris, *and* it runs actual commercial desktop software, it does it well, and that software interoperates well with open source and open systems software. And on top of that, it uses far more open-source than any other commercial UNIX.
the NeXTSt